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Feature Archive
Paul Klee, Adolf Hitler and America
Klee and America |
Currently on at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., through September 10, 2006 |
By Joseph Phelan |
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The German artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) may be the most approachable of the major 20th century modernists. Almost everyone likes the modest scale of his pieces, their childlike drawing, the playful titles, and the glowing colors.
Immediately enchanting and deceptively simple, the virtues of his art are abundantly displayed in nearly eighty rarely-seen works in Klee and America, a traveling exhibit currently at the Phillips Collection here in Washington D.C. Surprisingly, it's the first major U.S. exhibition of his work in twenty years.
The show, beautifully installed and carefully cadenced at the Phillips by curator Elizabeth Hutton Turner, is devoted to the last two decades of the artist's career -- when he went from being one of the leading stars of the European avant garde in the 1920s to being the despised target of Hitler's campaign against modern art, an exile in Switzerland until his death.
The exhibit opens with When God Considered the Creation of the Plants (1913), Klee's likeably idiosyncratic take on cubism, followed by two revelatory watercolors inspired by a trip to Tunisia. The Yellow House (1915) and Tunisian Gardens (1919) prompted his joyful exclamation "I know that I am a painter because I am color". You very likely will find yourself agreeing.
The show then jumps to the 1920s. Around this time, Klee famously observed that "art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible," an aphorism that became the cornerstone of the art of the 20th century. Such famous pieces as The Red Balloon (1922) and Fish Magic (1925) demonstrate his playful toggling between abstraction and figuration.
Klee's reception in the United States, as the show's title indicates, forms the framework of this exhibit. As early as 1931, the newly opened Museum of Modern Art, under the savvy leadership of Alfred Barr, devoted its first show of a living artist to Klee. This was a year before the museum devoted a show to Henri Matisse!
Duncan Phillips recognized Klee's talent around this time too, purchasing Tree Nursery. Yet he viewed the artist as a kind of delightful lyrical talent akin to Raoul Dufy in his lack of substance. Dufy however would never have produced a work like Twittering Machine (1922). What seems at first to be a sketch of an amusing mechanical toy or musical instrument turns into a menacing insight into the nature of the cosmos. It is as if a Walt Disney cartoon suddenly morphed into one by Tim Burton.
Here must be said that Klee put a high value on authenticity in art, and he found that authenticity in so called "primitive" culture and in the art of children and the insane. In an early newspaper article he said "All this [art] is to be taken very seriously, more seriously than all the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today's art."
This remark must have greatly disturbed some of his countrymen. Years later it was to be become the gravamen of the charges made against him by the National Socialists.
In 1933, Klee was dismissed from his teaching position by the newly appointed Nazi Minister of Culture. The artist voluntarily exiled himself to Switzerland. In 1937, the Party's notorious "Degenerate Art" exhibit showcased seventeen of his works as prime examples of the "corruption of art" that German modernism had wrought by its apparent rejection of the classical tradition of art and its aloofness from the concerns of ordinary people
The same German museums which had avidly collected his work, as well as those of Vincent Van Gogh and other modern "degenerates", were purged of their holdings. Hundreds of paintings and drawings came on the international art market at a time when museums and collectors in the United States were particularly receptive to Klee's work
During his last seven years in exile, Klee battled an incurable illness of the skin, scleroderma. Yet despite this double adversity, his creativity actually increased along the lines of Van Gogh's fantastically productive last three years. "I must draw every day" was his mantra. Almost half of Klee's astonishing output of 10,000 works was produced in these years.
The exhibit has a generous selection from this period when Klee seemed able to take the simplest of the elements of design -- the dot, the line -- and confer on them a kind of almost mythological status.
Angst (1934), The Path into the Blue (1934), Consecrated Child (1935), The Way to the Citadel (1937), The Sick Heart (1939) and The Man of Confusion (1939); all of these seem to resonant with the fragility of goodness at that fateful historical moment.
From the safety of Washington D.C., Duncan Phillips reassessed his superficial view of the artist and in the process began acquiring many more works. He converted a tiny sewing room in his Dupont Circle mansion (which the exhibit nicely recreates) into a shrine to Klee.
During the war years "almost everybody," as the art critic Clement Greenberg said, "whether conscious of it nor not, was learning from Klee." Several artists of the "greatest generation" -- Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey and Richard Diebenkorn -- stopped to look at the pieces on the wall. They were inspirited by Klee's works to transform American art into something both universal and profound.
The exhibit catalogue is edited by curators Josef Helfenstein of the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, where the exhibit originated, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner of the Phillips. It contains some excellent scholarly articles tracing the artist's reception in America over five decades, as well as valuable commentary on many individual works in the exhibit.
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Past Articles
2006
Anyone For Venice?, by Joseph Phelan
The Legends of Leonardo, by Joseph Phelan
Hey, "Dada"-Dude, Where's the Rest of Me?, by K. Kimberly King
Cézanne in Provence, by Joseph Phelan
Angels in America: Fra Angelico in New York, by Joseph Phelan
2005
Notes on New York (NoNY), by Joseph Phelan
The Greatest Painting in Britain
French Drawings and Their Passionate Collectors, by Joseph Phelan
Missing the Picture: Desperate Housewives Do Art History, by Joseph Phelan
The Salvador Dalí Show, by Joseph Phelan
2004
Boston Marathon, by Joseph Phelan
Philadelphia is for Art Lovers, by Joseph Phelan
Featured on the Web: Understanding Islamic Art and its Influence, by Joseph Phelan
Independence Day: Sanford R. Gifford and the Hudson River School, by Joseph Phelan
The "Look" of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, by Joseph Phelan
The Importance of Being Odd: Nerdrum's Challenge to Modernism, by Paul A. Cantor
2003
Advent Calendar 2003, narrated by Joseph Phelan
If Paintings Could Talk: Paul Johnson's Art: A New History, by Joseph Phelan
Mad Max [Max Beckmann], by Joseph Phelan
Marsden Hartley: The Return of the Native, by Joseph Phelan
Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment, by Joseph Phelan
Frederic Remington's Nocturnes, by Joseph Phelan
Magnificenza! Titian and Michelangelo, Manet and Velazquez, by Joseph Phelan
Masterful Leonardo and Graphic Dürer, by Joseph Phelan
Favorite Online Art Museum Features, by Joseph Phelan
Studies for Masterpieces, by John Malyon
2002
Portrait of the Artist as a Serial Killer, by Joseph Phelan
Renoir's Travelling, Bonnard's "At Home", by Joseph Phelan
The Philosopher as Hero: Raphael's The School of Athens, by Joseph Phelan
The Greatest Works of Art of Western Civilization
Celebrating Heroes; Celebrating Benjamin West, by Joseph Phelan
Chasing the Red Deer into the American Sublime (Education and the Art Museum, Part II), by Joseph Phelan
Planning Your Summer Vacation, by Joseph Phelan
Education and the Art Museum, Part I, by Joseph Phelan
Unsung Griots of American Painting, by Joseph Phelan
The British Museum COMPASS Project, interview by Joseph Phelan
Robert Hughes, Time Magazine Art Critic: Biography and Writings
2001
Software review: Le Louvre: The Virtual Visit on DVD-ROM, by Joseph Phelan
Tragedy and Triumph at Arles: Van Gogh and Gauguin, by Joseph Phelan
Her Last Bow: Sister Wendy in America, by Joseph Phelan
Love, Death and Resurrection: The Paintings of Stanley Spencer, by Joseph Phelan
Who is Rodin's Thinker?, by Joseph Phelan
Celebrations North and South, by Joseph Phelan
Rubens and his Age, by Joseph Phelan
Great Reproductions of Great Paintings
The Passion of Christ, by Joseph Phelan
Edouard Manet: Public Spaces, Private Dreams, by Joseph Phelan
Henry Moore and the British Museum: The Great Conversation, by Joseph Phelan
2000
Notorious Portraits, Part II, by John Malyon
Notorious Portraits, Part I, by John Malyon
The Other Michelangelo, by Joseph Phelan
The Art of Drawing, by Joseph Phelan
Poussin and the Heroic Landscape, by Joseph Phelan
Great Art Museums Online, by Joseph Phelan
Venetian Painting and the Rise of Landscape, by Joseph Phelan
Forbidden Visions: Mythology in Art, by Joseph Phelan
Themes in Art: The Passion of Christ, by Joseph Phelan
Web site review: Christus Rex
Web site review: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., by Joseph Phelan
Online exhibit review: Inuit Art: The World Around Me, by John Malyon
Poll: Who is Producing the Most Interesting Art Today? (Results)
Poll: Who is Producing the Most Interesting Art Today? (Part II)
1999
Poll: Who is Producing the Most Interesting Art Today? (Part I)
Spotlight on The Louvre Museum
Spotlight on Impressionism
Spotlight on Optical Art
Spotlight on Animals in Art
Spotlight on Surrealism
Spotlight on Sculpture
Spotlight on Women in the Arts
Spotlight on The Golden Age of Illustration
Spotlight on Vincent van Gogh
Spotlight on Great Art
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